Engineering Professor Receives Prestigious NSF Award

Chris Winstead, assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the College of Engineering at Utah State University, received a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation to study the possibility of correcting neural damage in the body using an electronic solution.

 

NSF “Career” awards are given to outstanding professors who have not yet received tenure but whose early completed research shows they have potential to have an impact in their fields. The awards support early teacher-scholar career-development research and educational activities that form a strong foundation for lifetime research and education. The awards are given in fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

 

“This is a very high profile award, a great marquee event and credit to the department and to Dr. Winstead,” said Todd Moon, department head of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

 

The career award will provide stable research funding for five years to further Winstead’s research activities on low-energy electronics for bio-implantable devices.

 

The application of Winstead’s research will be used in neural prosthetics, Winstead said. He hopes to create artificial communication networks that can bypass damaged neural circuits in the body. One possible application of the device would be to repair spinal cord injuries by using a wireless data network to transmit neural signals across the injury site. Another application would be to cure blindness by directly stimulating the brain's visual cortex.

 

“Dr. Winstead is one of the few people in the world who are approaching the problem this way, and it has potential for tremendous breakthroughs,” Moon said.

 

Winstead’s research would allow an implanted wireless data network to be inserted in the body to cure blindness by directly stimulating the brain’s visual cortex and repairing spinal cord injuries, Winstead said. The network transmits neural signals across the injury site at a very low power. The low-power, wireless-data network must have a high bandwidth to carry maximum amounts of information in and out of the body.

 

“For example, you wouldn't want your implant to malfunction when you walk through an airport metal detector, or when you drive past a cell-phone tower,” Winstead said. “This is a really challenging engineering problem that fits well with my background in low-energy and reliable circuits for communication.”

 

The problem is complex, he said.

 

“The devices must be very low power, because the high-power circuits tend to get hot; if the implanted device gets very hot, the excess heat can cause serious tissue damage,” he said. “We need our circuits to have minimum energy with maximum bandwidth to allow the device to be perfectly reliable and glitch free.”

 

He said there are many fascinating design problems related to bio-compatible circuits, including some of the basic examples such as problems for pace-maker designs, hearing aids and sensor circuits for monitoring blood pressure and body temperature. Environmental monitoring is another area where his research shows promise, and he hopes to uncover fundamental ideas that can be useful for these and other significant applications.